Booklist, July 9, 2001Colors (“the sky is teal, the ocean, the color of a razor”) form a vital lexicon of feeling in Moore’s incandescent poems, a visual language inherited, perhaps, from her grandmother, the painter Margarett Sargent, the subject of Moore’s evocative biography, The White Blackbird (1996). Paintings often inspire her, whether she’s writing about entering the world of a specific painting, as she does in “She Remembers,” written from the point of view of a woman posing nude for Degas, or the act of painting itself, as in “Bucarest, 1989,” a bravura poem about the unavailability of oil paints, especially the color white. Moore writes with an erotic intensity and lyric virtuosity about sexual desire for both women and men and the seductiveness of dreams and memories remembered so often they become virtual works of art kept in the most private of collections. Moore ’s poems are perfectly formed yet impassioned, flames confined to red-hot grates, incantations recited to transform confession and grief into liberation and warmth.
–Donna Seaman

Publishers Weekly, July 9, 2001While most of her bios list her as a poet first and foremost, Moore has published critical essays and a biography of her grandmother, the painter Margarett Sargent, in addition to her previous book of poems. This second collection sticks closely and honestly to two fields: painters and painting, and love and sex. Moore 's own close attention to color and arrangement distinguish poems on work by Degas and others, and enliven others based on personal memories. One autobiographical lyric tracks “the pale gray stain/ his eyes leave in my dreams”; another juxtaposes a remembered lover with Rousseau's ‘Sleeping Gypsy’ –“I was wearing green. Nineteen./ Flat cheap light illuminates/ a male, twenty-one.” Moore (whose first book of poems was called Memoir) also evokes--sometimes explicitly, sometimes obliquely--a great range of sexual and romantic experience, from date rape and abortion at Yale in the 1960s to lesbian love in middle age. (The collection also includes intimate elegies on family members and friends, some dead from AIDS.) Noted poet and translator Richard Howard praises Moore's “sensuous revelry” in a brief, admiring foreword, but Moore's openness and visual gestures often outrun the actual turns of phrase here: poems about the speaker's body veer into stock myth-making: “moon and/ goddess, tides and gravity,/ oh bring our blood!” Other poems remember passionate lovers with lines like these: “As we stood there, she pulled me toward her/ by the belt and thrust in with her hand”; “We met at a small supper outside Paris/ one late August”; “Dear one, I have met a man who touches me so it burns.” Many readers will prize Moore 's brave directness, or admire its politics implications; others, however, will wonder whether the poems do justice to a complicated life.

Boston Review, December 2001
In the thirteen years between her first poetry collection, Memoir, and her second, Darling, Honor Moore wrote The White Blackbird, a biography of the artist Margarett Sargeant (Moore’s grandmother), as well as a verse play. Poetry readers who loved Memoir will be interested to note how this versatile author’s new poems are clearly influenced by her exploration of the visual arts, and her work in biography and theater. Darling is saturated with sensuality and a poet’s yearning for visual expression with elegant descriptions of light and evocations of color. In lush monologues, Moore brings to startling life the women featured in Toulouse-Lautrec and Degas’s paintings. In “The Girl in the Fur-Trimmed Dress,” the female narrator takes issue with Toulouse-Lautrec’s famous rendering of her former lover, remembering with searing clarity and affection the middle-aged body of the model as the artist, seemingly, cannot. “She remembers” is spoken in the voice of a woman in Edgar Degas’s painting, The Bath, and describes a luminous carnality, love tinged with bitterness, between artist and model (“I won’t say what we did / that I wanted again and again, only / what grief I felt in his wanting”). These two poems comment wryly on “ New Haven , 1969,” a stark recollection of another kind of artists / model scenario: innocent college student assaulted by rapacious photographer. Blunt and brave, this poem describes the story in curt, plain couplets: “It’s an infection./ I call the gynecologist. He / asks if I’ve told anyone, / prescribes, hangs up.” Where “New Haven” depicts this sorrow, other poems celebrate more tender rituals of courtship, of falling in love, of remembering love, all with Moore’s unique ability to infuse her poems with real body heat, emotional electricity, and the divine grief at the center of desire.

–Brenda Shaughnessy

From “Not Betsy Ross" by Eileen Myles, The Nation, March 11, 2002Honor Moore 's Darling is in many ways the most ambivalent creature of the lot. Its cover is a photo that looks like a painting; the whole question of artifice abounds in this book. It’s conventionally poetic in some ways, but the ground is unstable, the largest tease in Darling being its title. A female nude leans into her position, gazing at flowers, and so many of the poems in the book are about love; sometimes the lovers are female, sometimes male. It's truly a midlife book about love and relationships, but the “Darling” of the title is not the woman gazing on the cover or one of the lovers or all of them. Instead, there's a dream of a funeral in an eponymous poem toward the end of the book; it's a family funeral, I guess. And there the dream's narrator saw her first gay man kiss another. After which he calls him “Darling.” It puts a spin on all the poems, making this trickster aspect of love be the star. Which love? The woman on the cover thinks: Hell, what's he gonna do now. Love is unfathomable, this poet knows.

Stylistically, Moore does not speak in excision. It’s an older ear. I'm thinking that a material everything hovers in her view, and the poems feel selected from that. We're moving through the fullness of a world, and memory. The surprises, the replacements, are conducted almost by sleight of hand. Like Bellamy's, this is also a poetry of class. I mean, what poetry isn't, but here I'm thinking upper class, and the poems are full of the aches of privacy; figuratively it starts in the dark and it returns. In the book's first poem, "Bucharest, 1989," a painter yearns for white, but the color is unavailable. The whole of this book is richly dark. It's hard to imagine most readers not approaching this world without a certain covetousness. In the same way that the name Robert Lowell was part of that poet's poetry, so is "Honor Moore." Her name approaches allegory, and even when you know she's being daily, it's a rarefied daily and it sings differently. A poem called “In the Dark;” however, approaches a Djuna Barnes or a Hart Crane wildness: “A goat strays/through my dreams, Doctor, a crazy dove,/and from Pontormo, a woman struck/ blind, her arms raised against the stranger.” It's a medallion of chaos, but emotionally it's as stamped as a coin, like an old dream that clangs long after its images are gone. I'm glad for the mystery here. The house of the book is huge, and it sheds light on the unknown. History is a place, after all, a very real and glamorous one, where strange things occur. In “Citizenship” she states: “I wake to cars raging north up a rise, a truck/banging south.” There's a loneliness to the notation.

My sense of the real time of the book comes out of these matter-of-fact lines. The poet wakes up and you feel she is ready to move, while still swarming with dreams. You feel the pause before the gesture, and the effect is quietly awesome. In “Undertow” a woman is described: “She liked to wear bright/colors, used the word 'sweetie” then a line later you realize it's the poet's mother. There's a movie star quality to the description: “I'm tiny in her arms, as if/flat against a steep mountain.” Even as we read the lines, the poet is fading into the distance-no one is bred for this experience. The poet endures her own pathos: “Understand I don't/believe this will ever change.” “Hollow Hill” is a swatch of prose that is not a “prose poem” but a tiny memoir of a child in a big house, where people have “old rooms;” as in “my father's old room.” On a planet where many people spend their lives moving constantly, on “Hollow Hill” not only is the poet's own childhood stable but her father's is too. Her parents sleep in “the Modern Room.” The reality of this family life is uncanny, museumlike, and the child iterates herself theatrically: “They don't let me keep the doll. I gallop back ... but I will never undress her or untie the red ribbons under her chin.” How I understand this book has to do with what seems disallowed in this very ornate, very conditioned reality. So much undoing is not visibly possible. I understand for instance, how our sense of the Gothic springs out of exactly this imaginary of old, dark ancestral houses, even beautiful places where things don't change much. Just deepen.

To be alive in these places one would become a reader of codes and elsewhere seek one's own undoing. That “undoing” being passion, which is the subject of this book. Passion being, I hate to say, so poetically, the most necessary flag. Lines slap us in the face, almost jumping out of the poems that hold them: “Nothing heals/like that hand” she utters in “Resonance,” which I think is the finest poem in Darling. The moment of the line is followed by a sort of rejection: “We don't have a life/together,” she says, “face toward/the child, window, the child running....” It's a heartbreaking reply, yet the power of the moment remains with the narrator. It resounds with a very female frankness that cuts across class in terms of knowing what one has made, has done.

Perhaps he's right about the cup.
You dig the clay or purchase it.
You cover it, keep it wet. One day
the clay calls you to model the cup

And what you've lived, every cup
To your lips, moves through your hands.

(from "Resonance")

As a reader these new books make me feel that so much good is already on its way to us. Like Lisa Robertson says: First of all belief is paradise. The right to assemble a moment of presence--a poem, this flickering banner of passion is ours.